K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Quicker framebuffer scrolling

Somehow I wandered onto this page the other day, and found a rather nifty framebuffer speedup tip. Adding this to your kernel boot line should give you quicker redraws when text is scrolling.

video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3

That works for me in both Crux and Arch, and I imagine any recent kernel should be able to work with it. For my extremely-slow-on-the-redraw Pentium, there wasn’t much of a difference to see. And in the case of a full-screen redraw of an application — in other words, not scrolling text — there isn’t any visible difference at all. So for example, resizing mc on the Pentium wasn’t any cleaner.

But I could see a small bump on a slightly faster machine using the framebuffer, and in the case of the X60s, it was much quicker. Too bad that’s not the one that really needs improvement. …😐

8 thoughts on “Quicker framebuffer scrolling”

Well, while I agree selfishly in what you are saying, I would say that this is kmandla’s blog and she/he will write about what she/he wants to, now it’s up to us if we want to read it or not, while I didn’t much enjoy that discussion I think we should welcome it too.

I am always very impressed by your use of the framebuffer. The thing that would stop me from switching is that I don’t seem to be able to get graphical display inside screen/dvtm/anything else as you do. What have you changed to allow mplayer to play its videos without some form of screen-splitter? It only works on the raw framebuffer for me which is far less useful.

I apologise for this perhaps not being the most appropriate venue for this question.

Thanks! The thing that always puts me off using the framebuffer on my desktop machine is that it is ridiculously slow at scrolling. Accidentally typing dmesg without tail is painful! It is some drive issues with the FB and my Nvidia card, rather strange but heh. I’ll check it out!

BTW, In my 1,5Ghz, 1GbRAM, 128Mb GPU laptop, I found out (wristwatch said so), that my Grub-to-Login times went up after using this trick, from 17 to 19 secs. I also get the feeling (haven`t taken times though), that Openbox took a bit longer to load.

Not that I mind that much the lag(CLI is still the quickest way for me to get a quick wikipedia search on the go), but it would be nice if anyone else could test it out too…